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Finally, Some Objective Figures On Games Piracy

Last year, a report from the Entertainment Software Association of Canada claimed that a whopping one-fifth of computer games in the US and Canada were pirated. It was just the latest in a series of assertions from the industry that file sharing is losing them billions of dollars.

Figures such as this, though, are heavily disputed – and now a group of university researchers says they’re plain wrong.

“First and foremost, [peer-to-peer] P2P game piracy is extraordinarily prevalent and geographically distributed,” says Anders Drachen of Aalborg University and Northeastern University. “However, the numbers in our investigation suggest that previously reported magnitudes in game piracy are too high.”

He, Robert Veitch of the Copenhagen Business School and Kevin Bauer of the University of Waterloo analyzed the file sharing of 173 computer games, for the PC, Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, DS, iOS/Mac and PSP, over a three-month period in 2010 and 2011. This wasn’t easy: the team had to create a custom web crawler to regularly query a BitTorrent search engine, then obtain metadata and use an HTTP ‘GET’ request to harvest the IP addresses that were doing the sharing.

And, they found, the actual number of illicit digital copies of computer games accessed on BitTorrent is nowhere near as high as claimed, with only around 12.6 million unique peers worldwide sharing illicit copies of games.

Interestingly, the common belief that it’s mainly hardcore shooter games that get pirated turned out also to be untrue. There’s piracy taking place across the board, it seems, from children’s games through to major commercial titles. These included Fallout: New Vegas, Darksiders, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, NBA 2k11, TRON Evolution, Call of Duty: Black Ops, Starcraft 2, Star Wars the Force Unleashed 2, Two Worlds II, The Sims 3: Late Night.

Just 20 countries or areas from a total of 250 accounted for a staggering three-quarters of total file-sharing activity. The top offenders – relative to population size – were Romania, Croatia, Ukraine, Greece, Poland, Italy, Armenia and Serbia. The researchers also note that there are big differences in the levels of piracy for different platforms. Console games are much harder to pirate than PC versions, as the console hardware needs to be modified.

Cloud-based gaming may make piracy less prevalent in future by streaming games on demand – there’s no place that games can be copied from, and no way to distribute them on the internet. In the meantime, though, it now seems the problem’s not as bad as it’s made out.

Of course, many of the 12.6 million IP addresses found to be sharing files over the three month period may have downloaded multiple games. All the same, that figure sits uncomfortably alongside a claim by the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), for example, that nearly ten million illegal downloads took place in December 2009 alone.

“The majority of the data available on game piracy originate from the industry (e.g., individual publishers or developers, as well as branch organizations such as the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) and the Business Software Alliance (BSA),” say the researchers in their report.

“The data reported by the industry are potentially biased, partially due to the interest of the industry to reduce piracy and thus potentially over-estimate the problem.”

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